


we're not done yet

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gay Keith (Voltron), Gen, Korean Keith (Voltron), Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 20:58:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8416498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: The paladins leave to find the last of her father’s legacy, and Allura is now the second-to-last Altean alive. She cannot think about this, as much as her bones cry out for her to scan for any similar replications of them across the universe. She has to hold the skies open for a species she has never met; one of them is stood by her still, watching her hold herself together with still, dark eyes.
“So,” he says. His name is Keith. He seems young for his species. She smiles at him and he blinks at her, frowning. “I’m gonna just -”
He gestures helplessly to the corner. She has no idea what this means.





	

The paladins leave to find the last of her father’s legacy, and Allura is now the second-to-last Altean alive. She cannot think about this, as much as her bones cry out for her to scan for any similar replications of them across the universe. She has to hold the skies open for a species she has never met; one of them is stood by her still, watching her hold herself together with still, dark eyes. 

“So,” he says. His name is Keith. He seems young for his species. She smiles at him and he blinks at her, frowning. “I’m gonna just -” 

He gestures helplessly to the corner. She has no idea what this means. They have no shared cultural context. The lack of foregrounding is terrifying. 

“Go ahead,” she says, trying for reassuring, and he nods, casts her another look that is darkly lit - and transparent, in a kind of bleak fashion. He heads to the corner and sits on the ground, curls his arms around his legs. 

“My family are dead,” he tells her, very suddenly. She understands his eyes now: they are understanding her. “I’m sorry.” 

“Thank you,” she says, startled. She hopes the translating device she keeps clipped to her earlobes is working. Languages change in ten thousand years, even if the technology has held. It seems to be. He nods curtly, and then leans back against the wall of the castle. In thirty seconds, he’s asleep. She assumes humans sleep; his breathing is slow and even, and his eyes move rapidly back and forth beneath their lids.

She turns back to her screens. She has work to do. The stitches of her own ribs creak with the effort of keeping herself locked down, but Allura cut her teeth on royalty. She can hold on.  

She begins with the human sleep cycle. It exists. Five ticks later, she’s gotten more on the circadian rhythms of her paladins than she might ever need. Humans dream like Alteans. Keith will naturally begin to wake again in between seventy to one hundred minutes, which appears to be a way of measuring time. She wonders if it will be enough. It’ll be enough to start with, she decides. 

*

Keith is woken by a sharp startle of sound. He half-opens his eyes. He can tell from the taste of the air in his mouth - metallic, almost medicinal - that none of it’s been a dream. Shiro’s alive, blue lions fly, and he’s sure as hell not in Arizona anymore.

He’s always hated Thursdays. This isn’t an exception. 

It takes him a few moments to adjust to the lights and the noise that must’ve woke him. Allura’s thrown thirty or so feeds up on the screen and Keith’s eyes hook into them immediately, something familiar in the undertow of overinformation that tugs at his gut.  

Keith is fast on the uptake, used to have twenty tabs out on his laptop screen like it was nothing, so it takes him about five seconds to realise what she’s doing. He sees: a year is three hundred and sixty five days, a year is broken down into portions of twelve, the days themselves twenty four hours, twenty four hours the revolution of a home planet, the rise and set of sun and an hour is sixty minutes, sixty seconds for a minute. The months are named for unpopular gods and old dead kings. In 1989, a wall (in Berlin, Germany, Europe) was broken down and everyone watched it happen on cuboid household screens. Yuri Gagarin smiles and in Russia they called them cosmonauts and in 1969 humans successfully navigated out of their protective atmosphere and onto the moon, and they wore suits that saved them from boiling alive in space. There was an emperor who cut away his sleeve rather than disturb the man he loved and there was an emperor who laughed whilst his city burned and there was a man who called himself Genghis Khan and there was a man who called himself Fuhrer and now they are all dead. The average human lifespan is seventy one Earth years and carbon dioxide kills them. Humans sing songs to their children and will exceed the limits of their own bodies if they are in danger. The first words sent out into the mythos of their international technology system were: this is for everyone. Keith lets her get to the footage of the atom bomb before he stands up. _I will show you fear in a handful of dust; it was a perfect illusion; all of this happened, more or less._ The images keep flaring up on the screen: thalidomide, Chernobyl, the United Nations calling itself to order. There are thousands of people marching; Keith sees black-clad women in the streets of Poland, a man against a tank in China, _I have a dream, I have a dream, I’m here to recruit you -_

“I thought you were a peaceful species,” Allura says, her eyes great moons. “I was always told humans were peaceful.” 

Keith looks at a woman fixing her lipstick in an advertisement segment, Silicon Valley, Hong Kong Harbour at night. 

He says, “I guess we’re trying?” 

She closes her eyes briefly, then opens them. 

“We write books about what we think you’re all like,” Keith says, a little helplessly, thinking of Shiro at the Garrison showing him nearly-obsolete paperbacks, thinking of taking them out of his box of things in the desert and reading them, only the second teenage boy to touch them in thirty years. He doesn’t know what to say. He isn’t good with words. She laughs and says, “Really?”

“Yeah. You’re usually either beautiful or trying to kill us. Although -” he slants his gaze towards Coran. She follows his gaze and laughs. Keith tenses up automatically at the sound. He can’t believe he’s trying to convince an alien princess his species aren’t going to become Galra 2.0 if she unleashes them on the universe. He can’t believe he’s trying to protect those assholes from eighth grade right now. He can’t believe he’s trying to protect the fucking _Garrison._ She looks at him warmly. If this was one of those books, this is the part where he’d try to kiss her. There’s a reason those things are outdated, Keith thinks. This ain’t that kind of movie. 

“Don’t believe all you read.”

“Shiro says that all the time,” Keith says. In his memory, there is no fear of dust. The dust is familiar under his hands and he climbs up onto his roof, drinks the cheapest six-pack he could find on the combined stretch of fake ID and his wallet. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, fuck all that noise; the grit under his nails is grounding. He looks up at the sky and thinks: _I’m coming for you, Shiro. I don’t know how, but I’m gonna. Don’t you go dying on me, Shiro. Don’t you go dying on me until I get there._

“Does he,” she murmurs, her hands holding open the wormholes his friends have gone through. 

Keith’s mother told him bedtime stories, and he can barely remember them, but he can remember the end of one: Pandora opens the box, and lets out all the suffering in the world in one great rush of acid and pain like a stomach wound. Pandora opens the box, and it can never be undone. Hope limps out before she shuts the lid. Keith’s mother says: _remember that part, Keith. Your grandparents came here all the way across the sea, and they did it on hope. It’s important, okay? It can only get better, honey. We all have the hope it can only get better._

“I won’t promise you anything,” he says. Promises are like stories; easy to take back, easy to break, easy to leave you waiting at the window with. He wishes it was anyone else here. He’d even let Lance take this on; words come easy for Lance, fall out of his mouth like something lighter and better than the stones on Keith’s tongue. Keith’s always too aware he can’t unsay the things he does. The last thing he said to Shiro before the Kerberos mission was _ I wish you weren’t going.  _ The last thing Shiro said was  _ I’ll be back before you know it. Count the days, if it helps.  _ Keith counted, and counted, and counted. As last words go, they weren't much. He climbed up the roof, the condensation on the cans cold against his stomach, and he counted to one hundred one of the first nights out there, and he just kept on going. The stars are endless. The stars are a memory.  _ We can’t imagine how much is out there, Keith. _

He takes a deep breath, and does what he's good at: he calls it like he sees it. 

“If you don’t want to take the chance on us, that’s...fair,” Keith tries, a little lamely. He’s beginning to think it would have been better for both of them if he’d just tried to kiss her, despite Keith liking boys, his pride, and his safety too much for it. Then at least she’d have thrown him out of the airlock, and he’d be out of the picture - and more importantly, this conversation. “I wouldn’t pick us for the saviours of our own world, let alone anyone else’s.” 

He’s very aware she has nothing to lose. 

“Would you?” Allura asks him, very softly. She’s still looking at the screens. Keith looks at them too. She’s paused on disaster relief from one of the early Noughties shootings; people are queued up around the block to give blood, standing in the rain and the hail to keep the hearts of strangers they will never meet beating on. “If I was you, and you were me?”

She looks at him then, the images flickering behind her, her face framed by the Venus de Milo, the haiku is a form of poetry, men stepping aside for children on the deck of a sinking ship.  

“I don’t think I have a choice, if I’m you,” Keith replies. “I think the worst that happens kind of already happened. To you, at least. And - I mean - you said the lion chooses the paladin, right? Did it choose you? Voltron?”

“No,” she replies, and his stomach drops but her eyes are far away. “Altea chose me.”  

“Well,” Keith says, watching something in her settle. “That works too?” 

She laughs. He doesn’t tense this time. He can tell it’s not at him. 

“Yes,” she says. “I think it does.” She eyes him, wry. “How far are you through the life cycle?”

“Not far enough for this.” 

She keeps looking at him expectantly. He shrugs. 

“Hey, I can’t even drink back home, alright?” 

“You can’t drink? I thought without water you died? I thought your bodies were made of wa --”

“No, I mean -” 

“Oh,” she says, “Oh, of course. How alien.” 

“Yeah,” Keith says, with feeling. It’s not as awkward as it could be. 

He doesn’t see the transformation take place, not really. It’s too subtle, in her shoulders and the set of her eyes, but when she turns to Coran then and says, “It’s time to recall the paladins,” she is every inch a princess again. It’s only when he sees the difference Keith sees that she had let her guard down at all; it’s only when Keith hears their footsteps as the others arrive back and retreats to where he was first stood, folding his arms and frowning, that he realises how close they’d both gotten to being afraid in front of each other. 

It should feel like a loss. Cutting yourself open always means someone takes something out. Leaving yourself open is a good way to get hurt where you’re already bruised. It should feel like a loss. He can hear Lance’s complaining ten metres before Lance makes it to the door and walks through. He sighs. Allura’s eyes dart to his and she winks, so fast, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fast. 

Shiro gives him a quick, strange look but says nothing. 

“So did you two,” Shiro asks later, warily, watching the perfect architecture of Allura’s spine, watches her walk away from them with her hand on Coran’s arm, “Did you.....talk to her?” 

_ Altea chose me, _ she had said. Keith knows all about legacy.  _ We all have the hope it can only get better.  _ He sees the whitening of Allura’s knuckles against Coran’s uniform for what it is. When someone takes something out, you stitch yourself back up with what you have, one stinging needle at a time, and you breathe through it, and when it’s done, you tell yourself - when it’s done, you can rest. 

“Like Keith learnt how to talk to girls in the desert,” Lance snorts. 

“I talked to her,” Keith says defensively, looks at all their surprised faces, and shrugs. “What? You thought I just stood there the whole time?”

“Kinda, dude,” Hunk mutters, albeit apologetically. “You don’t seem like the type.”

“Don’t believe everything you read,” Keith tells them absently. The doors shut behind Allura and Coran. She’ll keep it together until she’s out of earshot, Keith knows.  

“Dude? You’re making no sense right now.”

“As opposed to you,” Keith smirks at Lance, dragged back to the present, to the dirt under his nails and the sweat on the back of his neck and Lance’s raised eyebrows, because this is too easy, “At least you’re consistent, right?” 

Lance doesn’t get it for a good thirty seconds, and by the time he does, Keith has already begun walking away. Keith waits until the door shuts behind him to start laughing, but not until he’s out of earshot. Sometimes, it’s worth the work to be heard. 


End file.
